Disclaimer: Review originally posted at www.audiobookreviewer.com
Nate Wilder lives in eternal fear of environmental disasters, anxiety gets the best of him, and he lives obsessed by the daily news. After hearing about a new international threat he decides to get prepared and starts gathering supplies for the imminent apocalypse. He finds a suitable basement at the blood test facility where he works and starts to stash things away in the most secretive way, because he can’t face to be unprepared, but he can’t either face the fact that he might be overreacting.
Jeanette works with Nate at the blood test center, and she is lucky enough to be with Nate when the disaster happens. Both take refuge at the blood test center basement and find that Nate was right after all.
The story is built up very slowly. The first third of the book is just character introduction and how the disaster happened. We are presented with many political details that might have been overlooked, since they do not add much to the story. Also, in that first third of the book there are no dialogues, which makes it a bit dull.
Luckily after the bombs were dropped we start to see some character development and real things happening. There are several characters in the book but only three: Nate, Jeanette and Simon, are really developed and evolve with time. The rest of characters are plain and one-dimensional.
For me there is something in the rhythm of this book that does not completely work. While the beginning is very slow, the end feels rushed. One hour before the end I was convinced that we were going to be left with a cliffhanger leading to a second book, but the story is closed just at the very end. I would have expected and enjoyed a longer and more difficult trip of Nate and his six companions, and I even expected the reunion to happen in a second book. It just felt a bit anticlimactic and rushed.
The book is in general correctly written, but at times Ackerman uses repeated expressions like “Nate did this, Nate did that, Nate went”, that break the rhythm of the narration.
Kevin Pierce brought the story to life and it was an added value to the book. The audio production was correct.
All in all, I liked the story, and finding flawed characters makes it to become real. It is very interesting how they evolve, and Nate undergoes a heavy transformation from a very anxious person to somebody valuable for the community in the post-apocalyptical world.
My name is Elena. Since I was a little child I loved science fiction and fantasy, and I can’t resist a good novel. In 2015, while wait I started to listen to audiobooks and I discovered the pleasure in being able to read while doing my daily tasks, so there’s always an audiobook playing on my phone. If you see me with my Bluetooth headphones on, please be gentle, I get easily startled.
I live with my boyfriend, which I met during my six-year stay in Belgium, four cockatiels, eight lovebirds, and a hamster in Madrid, Spain; and I like to spend my free time knitting and sewing while listening to audiobooks.
